Biographie de René Girard: Nul n’est prophète en son pays (Written on the subway walls and tenement halls: Who will finally listen as the signs multiply from fashion fads to mass shootings of Girard’s masterful rediscovery of the Biblical truth of mimetic desire and conflict ?)

More ink equals more blood, newspaper coverage of terrorist incidents leads directly to more attacks. It’s a macabre example of win-win in what economists call a « common-interest game. Both the media and terrorists benefit from terrorist incidents. Terrorists get free publicity for themselves and their cause. The media, meanwhile, make money « as reports of terror attacks increase newspaper sales and the number of television viewers.Bruno S. Frey et Dominic Rohner

Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pen and keep your eyes wide the chance won’t come again and don’t speak too soon for the wheel’s still in spin and there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’. For the loser now will be later to win for the times they are a-changin’…Robert Zimmerman

And the people bowed and prayed To the neon god they made And the sign flashed out its warning In the words that it was forming and the sign said, « The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls » And whispered in the sounds of silence …Paul Simon

I tried very hard not to be influenced by him, and that was hard. ‘The Sound Of Silence’, which I wrote when I was 21, I never would have written it were it not for Bob Dylan. Never, he was the first guy to come along in a serious way that wasn’t a teen language song. I saw him as a major guy whose work I didn’t want to imitate in the least.Paul Simon

From the terrible opening line, in which darkness is addressed as “my old friend,” the lyrics of “The Sounds of Silence” sound like a vicious parody of a pompous and pretentious mid-’60s folk singer. But it’s no joke: While a rock band twangs aimlessly in the middle distance, Simon & Garfunkel thunder away in voices that suggest they’re scowling and wagging their fingers as they sing. The overall experience is like being lectured on the meaning of life by a jumped-up freshman. Worst Moment “Hear my words that I might teach you”: Officially the most self-important line in rock history!Blender magazine

I think it’s just about the design. People may be aware of the English but they don’t know the deeper meaning or that it’s meant to be political. The word ‘Jesse’ is just cute. It’s nothing more serious than that. Korean trends mostly start in the country’s underground markets, where everything is on sale for about $10 and the quality isn’t so bad. Even foreign fast-fashion brands like Zara can be too expensive for Koreans, so teenage girls and 20-somethings tends to buy these cheaper underground brands.Han Yoo Ra

This truth of globalization is easier to see in these absurd examples, when something incongruous takes off, such as an old campaign T-shirt from a failed primary run. In this particular example, the “Jesse Jackson ’88” part of the T-shirt may have its origin in the annals of American history, but the shirt caught on because of its exalted position within the Korean casual fashion system. Jesse Jackson, or even America, has little to do with why Jesse Jackson ’88 campaign T-shirts are popular. Instead, it’s South Korea’s incredible cultural power that makes things cool in Asia — even American political nostalgia. Vox

Could it be that in these frighteningly uncertain times, a classic brand such as Levi’s feels reassuring? Historically, Levi’s was workwear. It stands for old-school tradition, but it also has ties with rebellion and counterculture; like Oreos and Oprah, it brings together both sides of the American political spectrum. It is cool without being pretentious, and widely available: John Lewis, Debenhams, Topman, Asos and Amazon all stock the classic Levi’s tee, as well as Levi’s shops themselves. It might also be that it serves as a substitute for the pricier/trendier Supreme box logo shirt, but at a pocket-patting £20. Advertising has probably played a part in its recent popularity, even if it feels as if this trend started on the street. In August last year, the company released Circles, an ad showing people from different cultures dancing, from Bhangra to hora, dabke to dancehall, with the tagline: “Men, women, young, old, rich, poor, straight, gay: let’s live how we dance.” With 22m views, it was one of the top 10 most-watched ads on YouTube in 2017. The Guardian

Many observers have expressed concern for the excessive attention given to mass shooters of today and the deadliest of yesteryear. CNN’s Anderson Cooper has campaigned against naming names of mass shooters, and 147 criminologists, sociologists, psychologists and other human-behavior experts recently signed on to an open letter urging the media not to identify mass shooters or display their photos. While I appreciate the concern for name and visual identification of mass shooters for fear of inspiring copycats as well as to avoid insult to the memory of those they slaughtered, names and faces are not the problem. It is the excessive detail — too much information — about the killers, their writings, and their backgrounds that unnecessarily humanizes them. We come to know more about them — their interests and their disappointments — than we do about our next door neighbors. Too often the line is crossed between news reporting and celebrity watch. At the same time, we focus far too much on records. We constantly are reminded that some shooting is the largest in a particular state over a given number of years, as if that really matters. Would the massacre be any less tragic if it didn’t exceed the death toll of some prior incident? Moreover, we are treated to published lists of the largest mass shootings in modern US history. For whatever purpose we maintain records, they are there to be broken and can challenge a bitter and suicidal assailant to outgun his violent role models. Although the spirited advocacy of students around the country regarding gun control is to be applauded, we need to keep some perspective about the risk. Slogans like, “I want to go to my graduation, not to my grave,” are powerful, yet hyperbolic.James Alan Fox (Northeastern University)

By preaching against anorexia while keeping her own weight dangerously low, Isabelle Caro was telling her followers, « Take me as your guide, but don’t imitate me! » The paradox behind this type of mixed message was precisely diagnosed by Stanford’s René Girard, who names it the « mimetic double bind. » Since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, anyone is happy to attract followers, but if they imitate too successfully, they soon become a threat to the very person they took as their model. No one likes to be beaten at their own game. Hence the contradictory message: « Do as I do… just don’t outdo me! » Imitation morphs imperceptibly into rivalry – this is Girard’s great insight, and he applies it brilliantly to competitive dieting. There’s no use searching for some mysterious, deep-seated psychological explanation, Girard writes: « The man in the street understands a truth that most specialists prefer not to confront. Our eating disorders are caused by our compulsive desire to lose weight. » We all want to lose weight because we know that’s what everyone else wants – and the more others succeed in shedding pounds, the more we feel the need to do so, too. Girard is not the first to highlight the imitative or mimetic dimension of eating disorders and their link to the fashion for being thin, but he emphasizes an aspect others miss: the built-in tendency to escalation that accompanies any fashion trend: « Everybody tries to outdo everybody else in the desired quality, here slenderness, and the weight regarded as most desirable in a young woman is bound to keep going down. »Mark Anspach

“Evolution of Desire” is the portrait of a provocative and engaging figure who was not afraid of pursuing his own line of inquiry. His legacy is not so much a grand theory as it is a flexible interpretive framework with useful social, cultural and historical applications. At a time when religious fundamentalism, violent extremism and societal division dominates the headlines, Haven’s book is a call to revisit and reclaim one of the 20th century’s most important thinkers.Rhys Trante

René Girard, who died three years ago, was a French historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science. His sprawling oeuvre might be called anthropological philosophy. His books make connections through theology, literary criticism, critical theory, anthropology, psychology, mythology, sociology, cultural studies, and philosophy. His core theory is that our human motivations are rooted in “mimetic desire”—a form of envy which is not simply desiring what another has, but also desiring to be like them. This competitive drive then sparks all other human conflict on both the micro- and macroscopic levels. He explained how mimetic desire leads us to blame others when our desire is frustrated, which then leads to blaming others and ultimately to the mechanism of scapegoating on the societal level, which forms the basis for ritual sacrifice. An accomplished academic, journalist, and author, Cynthia Haven was not only a colleague of Girard but also a close friend to him and his wife. Her biography is a warm, personal memoir while also providing an introduction to his thought and the historical context for the development of his ideas. (…) Brought up in a conventional French Catholic home, by the time he was at university he had adopted the fashionable atheism of the day. Witnessing the treatment of the Jews and the scapegoating of French collaborators in the aftermath of the Second World War no doubt had an impact on the development of Girard’s thought. The academic vigor and enthusiasm in postwar United States provided the perfect setting for a philosopher and historian who was constantly thinking outside the boundaries of strict academic territories. He would come to interact with the avant-garde writers and philosophers of his day—Camus, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida—and yet rise above them and their frequent rivalries and needy egos. In a world of narrowing academia, in which professors knew more and more about less and less, Girard was one who transcended the blinkered biases, the bureaucratic boundaries, and artificially defined territories. As T.S. Eliot’s entire life’s work must be understood through the lens of his 1927 conversion to Christianity, so I believe Girard is also best understood through his profound reversion to his Catholic faith. (…) Girard’s own awakening began in the winter of 1958-59 as he was working on his book about the novel. (…) His intellectual awareness was combined later with a series of profound mystical experiences as he rode on the train from Baltimore to Bryn Mawr. (…) A bit later he had a health scare which pushed the intellectual and the subjective mystical experiences into a firm commitment to religion. (…) For those who like to spot little signs of a providential plan, it might be noted that René Girard (also called Noël) who was born on Christmas Day, dated his conversion to March 25—the feast of the Annunciation—traditionally the date for the beginning of God’s redemptive work in the world, and in medieval times the date for the celebration of the New Year. Girard’s conversion and subsequent practice of his Catholic faith was an act of great courage. His huge leonine profile with his contemplative gaze grants him a kind of heroic stature that reflects the heroism of his witness. As post-modern academia drifted further and further into Marxist ideologies, fashionable atheism, and nihilistic post-structuralism, Girard was able to put forward an intellectual explication for age-old Christian themes using a fresh vocabulary and perspective. (…) What Girard did was to provide a fresh synthesis and applications of old truths within non-religious disciplines. He also re-vivified the concept of sacrifice, explaining its underlying dynamic rather than simply writing it off as a barbaric superstition. In an age where atheism is all the rage and all religions (especially Catholicism) are suspect, Girard does a great service in refreshing the language of the tribe and giving the intellectual universe a way of seeing old truths in a new way and new truths through an old lens. As a result, his work has already been hugely influential in a range of disciplines, both academic and cultural. (…) Ms. Haven is not much of a name-dropper, but when she describes, for example, The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man symposium held at John Hopkins in 1966, the pomposity of the whole affair is comedic. I sensed a touch of sarcasm as she reports the competing egos of famous French philosophers and the rivalry between intellectuals trying to see whose presentations can be the most incomprehensible, while they are also comparing notes on the luxury of their accommodations and the numbers of young women they are able to lure into philosophical discussions between the sheets. Dwight Longenecker

Girard’s mimetic theory— majestic in its simplicity, sweeping in its scope — has a way of gathering up stray anecdotes and incidents into its collective force, like a hurricane that swallows up every bit of moisture within range. Cynthia Haven’s Evolution of Desire offers the first of two long-awaited bibliographies of Girard (the other, which has the official sanction of the Girard family, is by Benoît Chantre). Rather than providing a biographer’s biography— full of footnotes, every stone overturned, weighty enough to ensure nobody else tries to write one — Haven has instead provided a portrait of sorts, bringing to life the Girard she came to know in the winter of his life. This is not to say that Evolution of Desire reads as a kind of “ last days and sayings ” of René Girard; Chantre has already provided that in Les derniers jours de René Girard (Grasset, 2016). Haven prefers the early Girard, providing remarkable insights into his childhood, and underscoring the importance of his birthplace, Avignon, for his intellectual development. Of his intellectual collaborators, Haven favors those from Girard’s first stint at Hopkins, rather than later figures. By doing so, she downplays the interactions between theological interlocutors like Raymund Schwager and James Alison, perhaps the most important current translator of mimetic theory into Christian theology. Schwager receives some attention, but Alison’s name does not grace the book. Even those familiar with the brazen and iconoclastic interdisciplinary style of Girard can forget what an autodidact he was. Girard’s training, both in France and in the United States, was in history. The École des Chartes formed students into librarians and archivists. From there Girard went to the United States, where his forgettable dissertation at the University of Indiana covered American opinions on France during the Second World War. When Girard came to literature in the 1950s and 60s, he did so as an outsider. And he continued this pattern of butting into adjacent fields, among them anthropology, ethnology, and eventually theology. Haven ’s recounting of Girard’s early years highlights the panache that would mark Girard. Whether as a prankster in school, or as the organizer of an exhibit that brought Picasso to Avignon in 1947 — this event initiated the world-renowned Avignon Festival — Girard displayed winning qualities before becoming an immortel in the Académie Française. For those who’ve tracked Girard for the past three decades, it is easy to start with Girard’s occupancy of the Hammond Chair at Stanford, beginning in 1981. Haven points out the importance of the earlier academic posts, especially his first stint at Johns Hopkins from 1957 – 68. There Girard made his reputation and also experienced a two-fold conversion, first with the help of great literature, and then through a cancer scare in 1959. During this period Girard published Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961) and rose to full professor, hardly an anticipated development given his failure to publish at Indiana. Girard enthusiasts know these details, mostly from his interview with James Williams at the end of The Girard Reader. Haven embellishes them through corroborating witnesses from these years. In perhaps the most enjoyable chapter, “The French Invasion,” she recalls Girard’s role in a monumental conference at Hopkins: “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man.” This event marked the American emergence of Derrida, and decisively shifted Johns Hopkins as well as many other departments toward post-structuralism, or postmodernism. Although Girard had helped organize the conference, it led indirectly to his departure for Buffalo, as he could not bring himself to accept what he understood to be the anti-realist impulse of postmodern theory, which would become all the rage in literature departments. In his first stint at Hopkins, Girard became Girard. He trained his first graduate students there, including Andrew McKenna and Eric Gans. Girard also found important companions in Baltimore, including Richard Macksey, described as “a legendary polymath” (84), and a rising Dante scholar, John Freccero. Girard’s former chair at Hopkins, Nathan Edelman, recalls, “I thought of him as fearless. He had a tremendous self- confidence, in the best sense […] He never felt threatened by people who had different ideas […] We were enthralled by him. We desperately wanted his approval” (85). These sentiments arose well before Girard became a pied piper to Christian intellectuals. The strongest personal accusation from these years was that Girard could overgeneralize and dismiss too easily. (…) During these years Girard also met Jean-Michel Oughourlian, the first of many collaborators who would help Girard develop his distinctive interview-book. (…) Things Hidden signaled Girard’s coming out as a Christian, nearly twenty years after re-conversion in 1959. North Americans have developed a domesticated portrait of Girard: an interesting and important intellectual in the thrall of certain theologians. Yet in France, where the intellectual appetite is greater, Girard made an impact difficult to fathom. Haven notes that Things Hidden sold 35,000 copies in the first six months, which put it #2 on French non-fiction lists at the time. Eventually it sold 100,000 copies. That type of volume puts its somewhere between Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind in terms of immediate impact, and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age or Alistair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, in terms of longevity. In France, if you had not read Things Hidden, you at least needed to fake it. Girard credited his publisher for the success, but Haven brings out Girard’s penchant for melding social critique with self-examination, which often produced the experience of realizing, while reading his books, that they were reading you. Haven describes Girard’s conversion and attends to his practice of Christianity, but does not make it the central thread of her biography. Although she relies on exchanges with friends of Girard, she pays less mind than some would to the encounter with Schwager, the Swiss Jesuit, despite the fact that their letters have recently been published and translated into English. Schwager first wrote Girard in 1974, and at that time saw what had only been a plan in Girard’s mind: the connection between the Bible and Girard’s theory of the sacred. When Schwager wrote Must There Be Scapegoats? , it actually appeared a few months prior to Things Hidden. As their letters make clear, despite a great debt to Girard, Schwager was an original thinker in his own right, and eventually helped Girard to change his mind about the relationship between sacrifice and Christianity. Haven credits Schwager with encouraging Girard’s desire to be theologically orthodox, although this had mixed results. By becoming a sort of defender of the Catholic faith, it “took him one large step farther away from fashionable intellectual circles and their feverish pursuit of novelty” (228). Haven also passes over The Scapegoat (1982), and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (2001), which provide perhaps the richest sources for understanding Girard as a Christian thinker. This decision is somewhat remedied by Haven’s attention to Girard’s final major work, Battling to the End (2007). Haven was close to Girard at the time, and provides several first-hand anecdotes important for his readers. The pessimism and apocalyptic tone in the book really was Girard’s, and not Chantre’s. She also relays that Girard and Chantre had plans for an additional book on Paul. Although Battling to the End made a minor splash in the United States, it sold 20,000 copies in the first three months in France, was reviewed in all of the major newspapers, and was even cited by then-president Sarkozy. While Girard was in Paris, reporters waited outside his doorstep, whereas at Stanford, “Girard walked the campus virtually unnoticed and unrecognized” (254). Haven’s account focuses more on Girard than on the expansions of his influence. For many Girardians, the story of Girard’s intellectual journey should culminate in the Colloquium on Violence & Religion, founded in 1990 with Girard’s blessing, and faithfully attended by Girard until ill-health prevented him. The Colloquium continues to draw between one and two hundred attendees to its annual meeting. Although not all attendees are theologians or Christians, the attendees who work in literature tend to study figures like Tolkien, and many of the invited plenary speakers are major theologians or Christian intellectuals like Jean-Luc Marion or Charles Taylor. It will take some recalibration for these kinds of readers to understand that Girard’s interests cannot simply be distilled into a Christian apologetic, however subtly one might want to apply that term to Girard. Still, those invested in carrying on Girard’s legacy should welcome a book that traces Girard’s appeal so broadly. (…) The man claimed on more than one occasion that his theory sought to give Christianity and Christian theologians the anthropology that it deserved. Haven has provided a warm and magnanimous biography that Girard most certainly deserves. Grant Kaplan

On the occasion of the induction of the Franco-American intellectual René Girard (1923–2015) into the Académie Française in Paris in 2005, Girard articulated an abhorrence of what he called the modern descent into “the anti-Christian nihilism that has spread everywhere in our time.” One might well say that over a 60-year period, after his arrival from France as a graduate student at Indiana University in 1947, the literary critic and eventual anthropologist Girard found himself increasingly exposing, analyzing, and challenging this nihilism, and in fact progressively purging its residual effects in himself as a legatee of the histrionic, skeptical French literary-cultural tradition since the mid 18th century, deplored in the mid 19th century by Alexis de Tocqueville, one of whose chief facets Girard characterized as “decadent aestheticism.” Cynthia L. Haven’s outstanding new biographical and critical study, Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, is a brilliant survey of his life and thought, but also a document of high importance for understanding what has happened to the conception and teaching of the humanities in the United States and elsewhere since the 1960s, and why Lionel Trilling was right to worry about “the uncertain future of humanistic education,” the title of a 1975 essay. (…) Girard in Mensonge romantique grants that competitive envy is the very social-psychological motor that drives “enlightened,” atheistic modern personal and social life. “At the heart of the book,” Cynthia Haven writes, “is our endless imitation of each other. Imitation is inescapable.” And she continues: “When it comes to metaphysical desire — which Girard describes as desires beyond simple needs and appetites — what we imitate is vital, and why.” We are inevitably afflicted with “mimetic desires,” first of parents and siblings, then of peers, rivals, and chosen role models, and these desires endlessly drive and agitate us, consciously and unconsciously, causing anxiety and “ontological sickness.” (…) Girard’s argument is that Rousseau’s ideal of completely autonomous personal authenticity, with its explosive social-political effects, is an initially alluring but ultimately and utterly false Narcissistic idol. Our free will is always (and always has been) constrained and conditioned, though not necessarily determined, by the very facts of human childhood, parenting, and linguistic, cognitive, conceptual, and cultural development (…) In 1958–59, before and while writing the “Romantic falsehood” volume, Girard went through internal, personal experiences corresponding to the implications of his own analysis of the “canker vice, envy,” and they amounted to an unexpected Christian conversion, about which Haven writes very well. Still nominally very much part of an atheistic, anti-foundational, French academic avant-garde in the United States, and now increasingly prominent in his position at Johns Hopkins, Girard was even one of the chief organizers of “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” the enormously influential conference, in Baltimore in October 1966, that brought to America from France skeptical celebrity intellectuals including Jacques Lacan, Lucien Goldmann, Roland Barthes, and, most consequentially, the most agile of Nietzschean nihilists, Jacques Derrida, still obscure in 1966 (and always bamboozlingly obscurantist) but propelled to fame by the conference and his subsequent literary productivity and travels in America: another glamorous, revolutionary “Citizen Genet,” like the original Jacobin visitor of 1793–94. After this standing-room-only conference, Derrida and “deconstructionism,” left-wing Nietzscheanism in the high French intellectual mode, took America by storm, which is perhaps the crucial story in the subsequent unintelligibility, decline, and fall of the humanities in American universities, in terms both of enrollments and of course content. The long-term effect can be illustrated in declining enrollments: at Stanford, for example, in 2014 alone “humanities majors plummeted from 20 percent to 7 percent,” according to Ms. Haven. The Anglo-American liberal-humanistic curricular and didactic tradition of Matthew Arnold (defending “the old but true Socratic thesis of the interdependence of knowledge and virtue”), Columbia’s Arnoldian John Erskine (“The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent,” 1913), Chicago’s R. M. Hutchins and Mortimer Adler (the “Great Books”), and English figures such as Basil Willey (e.g., The English Moralists, 1964) and F. R. Leavis (e.g., The Living Principle: “English” as a Discipline of Thought, 1975) at Cambridge, and their successor there and at Boston University, Sir Christopher Ricks, was rapidly mocked, demoted, and defenestrated, with Stanford students eventually shouting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho! / Western civ has got to go!” The fundamental paradox of a relativistic but left-wing, Francophile Nietzscheanism married to a moralistic neo-Marxist analysis of cultural traditions and power structures — insane conjunction! — is now the very “gas we breathe” on university campuses throughout the West (…). Girard quietly repented his role in introducing what he later called “the French plague” to the United States, with Derrida, Foucault, and Paul DeMan exalting ludicrous irrationalism to spectacular new heights. His own efforts turned increasingly to anthropology and religious studies. Rousseau, Romantic primitivism, Nietzsche, and French aestheticism, diabolism (“flowers of evil”), and atheistic existentialism — Sade, Baudelaire, Gide, Sartre, Jean Genet, Foucault, Derrida, de Man, Bataille — had drowned the residually Christian, Platonist, Arnoldian liberal-humanistic tradition, which proved to be an unstable halfway house between religion and naturalism. Yet the repentant Girard resisted the deluge and critiqued it, initially from within (Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust), but increasingly relying on the longer and larger literary tradition, drawing particularly on Dante and Dostoyevsky as well as the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures. Like other close readers of Dostoyevsky, such as Berdyaev, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, other anti-Communist dissidents including Czesław Miłosz, Malcolm Muggeridge, and numerous Slavic scholars such as Joseph Frank, Girard came to see Dostoyevsky as the greatest social-psychological analyst of and antidote to the invidious “amour propre” and restless revolutionary resentments of modern life, themselves comprising and confirming an original sin of egotism and covetousness. Like Dostoyevsky, Girard became an increasingly orthodox Christian, seeing in the imitation of Christ the divinely appointed way out of the otherwise endless, invidious, simian hall-of-mirrors of “mimetic desires.” Girard argued that these competitive, comparative “mimetic desires” had geopolitical and not only personal and social effects, from the 18th century onward: siblings versus siblings, generations versus generations, nations versus nations (e.g., French versus Germans, 1789–1945, about which he wrote poignantly at the end of his life), cultures versus cultures (Islam versus the West today). (…) At Girard’s induction into the Académie Française in Paris in 2005, his fellow French Academician (and friend and Stanford colleague) Michel Serres also spoke and passionately deplored the violent and perverse world of contemporary audiovisual media, representing and exulting in human degradation “and multiplying it with a frenzy such that these repetitions return our culture to melancholic barbarism” and cause “huge” cultural “regression.” Rousseau’s idyllic Romantic dream has been transmogrified into Nietzsche’s exultant criminal vision of a world “beyond good and evil.” (…) Despite his enormous general audience and success in France, and the amazingly successful, disintegrative, Franco-Nietzschean “deconstructionist” invasion of American and British universities, publishing houses, and elite mentalities, he “marveled at the stability of the United States and its institutions,” Girard’s biographer tells. Let us hope Girard is right. Another Franco-American immigrant-intellectual of great integrity, intelligence, and influence, Jacques Barzun (1907–2012), wrote in his magisterial final work of cultural history, From Dawn to Decadence (2000), that modernism is “at once the mirror of disintegration and an incitement to extending it.” Cynthia Haven’s fine book on Girard is both brilliant cultural criticism and exquisite intellectual history, and an edifying biographical and ethical tale, providing a philosophical vision of a world beyond monkey-like mimicries and manias that demoralize, dispirit, and dehumanize the contemporary human person. It deserves wide notice and careful reading in a time of massive and pervasive attention-deficit disorder.M. D. Aeschliman

René Girard (1923- 2015) (…) is now the subject of a comprehensive biography by Cynthia Haven called “Evolution of Desire.” The title is apt. A key concept in Girard’s philosophy is what he called “mimetic desire.” All desire, he argued, is imitation of another person’s desire. Mimetic desire gives rise to rivalries and violence and eventually to the scapegoating of individuals and groups—a process that unites the community against an outsider and temporarily restores peace. Girard believes that the scapegoat mechanism has been intrinsic to civilization from its beginning to our own time. (…) Ms. Haven calls mimetic desire the linchpin of Girard’s work, equivalent to Freud’s fixation on sexuality and Marx’s focus on economics. In her discussion of Girard’s 1972 book “Violence and the Sacred,” she traces a trajectory from desire to conflict and ultimately to the scapegoating of entire groups. Think of the lynching of African-Americans, the systematic extinction of Jews in Nazi Germany, the murder of Christians in Muslim countries, and the current animus toward immigrants in Europe and America. Ms. Haven credits the French psychiatrist Jean-Michel Oughourlian with bringing Girard’s mimetic ideas into the social sciences. (…) When Mr. Oughourlian and Girard finally met in Paris, they experienced a mutual sympathy that led to collaboration on “Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World,” first published in French in 1978. The title, taken from the Gospel of Matthew, reflected Girard’s increasing concern with Christianity, which he saw as a source for ending history’s perpetual cycles of violence. (…) Even as Girard negotiated the politics of American academe and international rivalries, he drew strength from his Catholic faith. Ms. Haven sympathetically recounts his conversion experiences in 1958 and 1959. At a time when atheism was practically de rigueur among French intellectuals, Girard came out not only as a believer but also as a spokesman for what he called the “truths of Christianity.” Among them, nonviolence headed the list, for he believed that Jesus, unlike earlier scapegoats and sacrificial victims, offered a path to lasting peace. Ms. Haven adds her own eloquent words: “The way to break the cycle of violent imitation is a process of imitatio Christi, imitating Christ’s renunciation of violence. Turn the other cheek, love one’s enemies and pray for those who persecute you, even unto death.” This message is as radical today as it was 2,000 years ago.Marilyn Yalom

A comprehensive new biography on the life of a French intellectual of international prominence who crossed the boundaries of literature, history, psychology, sociology, anthropology and religion.

Marilyn Yalom

The Wall Street Journal

June 1, 2018

René Girard (1923- 2015) was inducted into the French Academy in 2005. Many of us felt this honor was long overdue, given his international prominence as a French intellectual whose works had crossed the boundaries of literature, history, psychology, sociology, anthropology and religion. Today his theories continue to be debated among “Girardians” on both sides of the Atlantic. He is now the subject of a comprehensive biography by Cynthia Haven called “Evolution of Desire.”

The title is apt. A key concept in Girard’s philosophy is what he called “mimetic desire.” All desire, he argued, is imitation of another person’s desire. Mimetic desire gives rise to rivalries and violence and eventually to the scapegoating of individuals and groups—a process that unites the community against an outsider and temporarily restores peace. Girard believes that the scapegoat mechanism has been intrinsic to civilization from its beginning to our own time.

My personal acquaintance with René Girard began in 1957, when I entered Johns Hopkins as a graduate student in comparative literature at the same time that he arrived as a professor in the department of Romance languages. With his thick dark hair and leonine head, he was an imposing figure whose brilliance intimidated us all. Yet he proved to be generous and tolerant, even when I announced that I was to have another child—my third in five years of marriage.

Whatever his private feelings about maternal obligations—he and his wife, Martha, had children roughly the same age as ours—he always showed respect for my perseverance in the dual role of mother and scholar. Under his direction, I managed to finish my doctorate in 1963 and commenced a career as a professor of French.

Evolution of Desire

By Cynthia L. Haven

Michigan State, 317 pages, $29.95

Fast forward to 1981, when Girard came to Stanford University. I had been a member of the Stanford community for two decades, first through my husband, then on my own as a director of the Center for Research on Women. On campus, Girard quickly became a hallowed presence, a status he maintained long after his official retirement.

Among the people drawn into his life at Stanford was Ms. Haven, who formed a close friendship with Girard that eventually inspired her to write “Evolution of Desire.” Having already written books on the Nobel Prize-winning poets Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky, Ms. Haven is no stranger to the challenges of presenting a great man’s life and ideas to the public. Her carefully researched biography is a fitting tribute to her late friend and one that will enlighten both specialists and non-specialists alike.

Ms. Haven rightly advises readers unfamiliar with Girard’s work to begin by reading his 1961 opus “Deceit, Desire, and the Novel.” This book demonstrates how the “romantic lie” underlying the belief in an autonomous self is punctured by the “fictional truth” found in such writers as Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevsky and Proust. In their novels, the protagonist comes to realize that his dominating passion is what Girard alternately calls “mimetic,” “mediated” or “metaphysical.” The fictive hero’s mimetic desire leads to social conflict and personal despair until he renounces the romantic lie and seeks some form of self-transcendence. Readers of Proust may remember Swann’s ultimate reflection: “To think that I ruined years of my life . . . for a woman who wasn’t even my type.”

Ms. Haven calls mimetic desire the linchpin of Girard’s work, equivalent to Freud’s fixation on sexuality and Marx’s focus on economics. In her discussion of Girard’s 1972 book “Violence and the Sacred,” she traces a trajectory from desire to conflict and ultimately to the scapegoating of entire groups. Think of the lynching of African-Americans, the systematic extinction of Jews in Nazi Germany, the murder of Christians in Muslim countries, and the current animus toward immigrants in Europe and America.

Ms. Haven credits the French psychiatrist Jean-Michel Oughourlian with bringing Girard’s mimetic ideas into the social sciences. She relates the amusing story of how Mr. Oughourlian crossed the Atlantic impulsively in 1973 so as to find the author of “Violence and the Sacred” in New York. He was dismayed to discover that Girard was not in New York City but in far-away Buffalo at the State University of New York, where the former Hopkins professor of French had accepted a position in the English Department. When Mr. Oughourlian and Girard finally met in Paris, they experienced a mutual sympathy that led to collaboration on “Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World,” first published in French in 1978. The title, taken from the Gospel of Matthew, reflected Girard’s increasing concern with Christianity, which he saw as a source for ending history’s perpetual cycles of violence.

Ms. Haven’s ability to interweave Girard’s life with his publications keeps her narrative flowing at a lively pace. For a man who woke every day at 3:30 a.m. and wrote until his professorial duties took over, it would be enough for any biographer to focus on his intellectual life, without linking his thoughts to a person ambulating in the world. Fortunately, Ms. Haven portrays Girard as he interacted with colleagues, students, friends and family.

The list of his close associates throughout his long career at Hopkins, Buffalo and Stanford is impressive. It includes such distinguished scholars and critics as John Freccero, Richard Macksey, Eugenio Donato, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Michel Serres, Hans Gumbrecht and Robert Harrison. A complete list would run close to 40 or 50 men.

Yes, all men. I can’t refrain from noting the exclusively male nature of Girard’s intellectual network, as well as the predominance of men in competing movements, like structuralism and deconstructionism. The chapter Ms. Haven devotes to a major conference organized by Girard and his Hopkins associates in 1966 reads like an uproarious movie script featuring the oversize egos of the all-male cast, most notably the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

Even as Girard negotiated the politics of American academe and international rivalries, he drew strength from his Catholic faith. Ms. Haven sympathetically recounts his conversion experiences in 1958 and 1959. At a time when atheism was practically de rigueur among French intellectuals, Girard came out not only as a believer but also as a spokesman for what he called the “truths of Christianity.” Among them, nonviolence headed the list, for he believed that Jesus, unlike earlier scapegoats and sacrificial victims, offered a path to lasting peace. Ms. Haven adds her own eloquent words: “The way to break the cycle of violent imitation is a process of imitatio Christi, imitating Christ’s renunciation of violence. Turn the other cheek, love one’s enemies and pray for those who persecute you, even unto death.” This message is as radical today as it was 2,000 years ago.

—Ms. Yalom is a senior scholar at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. Her most recent book is “The Amorous Heart: An Unconventional History of Love.”

In a new biography of the anthropologist and literary critic, we glimpse the personal experiences that corresponded to his analysis of competitive envy.Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, by Cynthia L. Haven (Michigan State University Press, 346 pages, $29.95)

On the occasion of the induction of the Franco-American intellectual René Girard (1923–2015) into the Académie Française in Paris in 2005, Girard articulated an abhorrence of what he called the modern descent into “the anti-Christian nihilism that has spread everywhere in our time.” One might well say that over a 60-year period, after his arrival from France as a graduate student at Indiana University in 1947, the literary critic and eventual anthropologist Girard found himself increasingly exposing, analyzing, and challenging this nihilism, and in fact progressively purging its residual effects in himself as a legatee of the histrionic, skeptical French literary-cultural tradition since the mid 18th century, deplored in the mid 19th century by Alexis de Tocqueville, one of whose chief facets Girard characterized as “decadent aestheticism.”

Cynthia L. Haven’s outstanding new biographical and critical study, Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, is a brilliant survey of his life and thought, but also a document of high importance for understanding what has happened to the conception and teaching of the humanities in the United States and elsewhere since the 1960s, and why Lionel Trilling was right to worry about “the uncertain future of humanistic education,” the title of a 1975 essay. Starting out as a literary critic writing mainly about the 19th-century novel, Girard developed into a wide-ranging cultural critic and anthropologist at Johns Hopkins (1957–68, 1976–80) and then at Stanford (1981–2015). His thinking has had a vast effect throughout the Western world on literary studies, anthropology, sociology, religious studies, theology, and even the writing of history, influencing numerous scholars in these fields, as well as novelists (Milan Kundera, J. M. Coetzee), and leading to associations and journals for the study and application of his thought. Evolution of Desire is itself a distinguished, judicious work of interdisciplinary cultural analysis and synthesis in the current of Girard.

Most of Girard’s books were published first in French in France, some of them best-sellers, leading ultimately to his election to the Académie Française. The first, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (1961; with a pun on “roman,” which also means the novel) was translated into English and published as Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (1965), and it introduced the theme, which he called “mimetic desire,” that would make Girard famous and influential in the world of the humanities.

The “romantic falsehood” of Girard’s title derives ultimately from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s conception of personal authenticity, portrayed in his fiction, his autobiographical Confessions (1781), and especially in his tendentious, tiresome, heartlessly long and repetitive educational novel Emile (1762), perhaps the single most influential book on education published in the last 250 years. Rousseau argued that in the aboriginal state of nature (or in childhood itself) the human person had a necessary and good kind of self-love (amour de soi-même) but that in the formation of human societies (and adulthood itself) men fell into endless, anxious, comparative, competitive, invidious self-love (amour propre). Rousseau said that his main principle was that “nature makes man happy and good, but that society depraves him and renders him miserable.” Life in existing society is fallen, alienated, insincere, inevitably inauthentic; so too is modern adulthood. The revolutionary implications of this conception found their first political heroes in Robespierre and the Jacobins, and the first of their many explosive modern political outbursts came in the sanguinary French Revolution. Burke saw and said that Rousseau’s alluring concepts and words came first: The catastrophic French Revolution was their sequel.

Girard in Mensonge romantique grants that competitive envy is the very social-psychological motor that drives “enlightened,” atheistic modern personal and social life. “At the heart of the book,” Cynthia Haven writes, “is our endless imitation of each other. Imitation is inescapable.” And she continues: “When it comes to metaphysical desire — which Girard describes as desires beyond simple needs and appetites — what we imitate is vital, and why.” We are inevitably afflicted with “mimetic desires,” first of parents and siblings, then of peers, rivals, and chosen role models, and these desires endlessly drive and agitate us, consciously and unconsciously, causing anxiety and “ontological sickness.”

An example is given in a recent essay by Ross Douthat about Ivy League American education: “The eliter-than-elite kids . . . help create a provisional inside-the-Ivy hierarchy that lets all the other privileged kids, the ones who are merely upper-upper middle class, feel the spur of resentment and ambition that keeps us running, keeps us competing, keeps us sharp and awful in all the ways that meritocracy requires.” Tom Wolfe’s satirical college-campus novel I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004) illustrates these dismal, malignant dynamics in ways that must depress and even nauseate those of us who are professional educators, shocked by the accuracy of its representation of campus degradation, where facilities improve and character deteriorates.

Girard’s argument is that Rousseau’s ideal of completely autonomous personal authenticity, with its explosive social-political effects, is an initially alluring but ultimately and utterly false Narcissistic idol. Our free will is always (and always has been) constrained and conditioned, though not necessarily determined, by the very facts of human childhood, parenting, and linguistic, cognitive, conceptual, and cultural development (see my “Mother, Child, and Language” at NRO). There have always been powerful critics of Rousseau: from H. S. Gerdil (The Anti-Emile, 1763; English translation, 2011), Samuel Johnson, Burke, and Hamilton in Rousseau’s own time, to Irving Babbitt (Rousseau and Romanticism, 1919), Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, and Lionel Trilling in the mid 20th century, and, more recently, E. D. Hirsch (see chapter 4 of The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them, 1996). They have argued persuasively against Rousseau’s anarchic, antinomian, seductive Romantic vision, and Cynthia Haven’s account of Girard’s thought and psychological-emotional development effectively and movingly extends and amplifies their critique.

In 1958–59, before and while writing the “Romantic falsehood” volume, Girard went through internal, personal experiences corresponding to the implications of his own analysis of the “canker vice, envy,” and they amounted to an unexpected Christian conversion, about which Haven writes very well. Still nominally very much part of an atheistic, anti-foundational, French academic avant-garde in the United States, and now increasingly prominent in his position at Johns Hopkins, Girard was even one of the chief organizers of “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” the enormously influential conference, in Baltimore in October 1966, that brought to America from France skeptical celebrity intellectuals including Jacques Lacan, Lucien Goldmann, Roland Barthes, and, most consequentially, the most agile of Nietzschean nihilists, Jacques Derrida, still obscure in 1966 (and always bamboozlingly obscurantist) but propelled to fame by the conference and his subsequent literary productivity and travels in America: another glamorous, revolutionary “Citizen Genet,” like the original Jacobin visitor of 1793–94.

After this standing-room-only conference, Derrida and “deconstructionism,” left-wing Nietzscheanism in the high French intellectual mode, took America by storm, which is perhaps the crucial story in the subsequent unintelligibility, decline, and fall of the humanities in American universities, in terms both of enrollments and of course content. The long-term effect can be illustrated in declining enrollments: at Stanford, for example, in 2014 alone “humanities majors plummeted from 20 percent to 7 percent,” according to Ms. Haven. The Anglo-American liberal-humanistic curricular and didactic tradition of Matthew Arnold (defending “the old but true Socratic thesis of the interdependence of knowledge and virtue”), Columbia’s Arnoldian John Erskine (“The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent,” 1913), Chicago’s R. M. Hutchins and Mortimer Adler (the “Great Books”), and English figures such as Basil Willey (e.g., The English Moralists, 1964) and F. R. Leavis (e.g., The Living Principle: “English” as a Discipline of Thought, 1975) at Cambridge, and their successor there and at Boston University, Sir Christopher Ricks, was rapidly mocked, demoted, and defenestrated, with Stanford students eventually shouting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho! / Western civ has got to go!”

The fundamental paradox of a relativistic but left-wing, Francophile Nietzscheanism married to a moralistic neo-Marxist analysis of cultural traditions and power structures — insane conjunction! — is now the very “gas we breathe” on university campuses throughout the West (see my “Lincoln and Leo XIII against the Nietzscheans” at NRO).

Girard quietly repented his role in introducing what he later called “the French plague” to the United States, with Derrida, Foucault, and Paul DeMan exalting ludicrous irrationalism to spectacular new heights. His own efforts turned increasingly to anthropology and religious studies. Rousseau, Romantic primitivism, Nietzsche, and French aestheticism, diabolism (“flowers of evil”), and atheistic existentialism — Sade, Baudelaire, Gide, Sartre, Jean Genet, Foucault, Derrida, de Man, Bataille — had drowned the residually Christian, Platonist, Arnoldian liberal-humanistic tradition, which proved to be an unstable halfway house between religion and naturalism. Yet the repentant Girard resisted the deluge and critiqued it, initially from within (Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust), but increasingly relying on the longer and larger literary tradition, drawing particularly on Dante and Dostoyevsky as well as the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures. Like other close readers of Dostoyevsky, such as Berdyaev, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, other anti-Communist dissidents including Czesław Miłosz, Malcolm Muggeridge, and numerous Slavic scholars such as Joseph Frank, Girard came to see Dostoyevsky as the greatest social-psychological analyst of and antidote to the invidious “amour propre” and restless revolutionary resentments of modern life, themselves comprising and confirming an original sin of egotism and covetousness. Like Dostoyevsky, Girard became an increasingly orthodox Christian, seeing in the imitation of Christ the divinely appointed way out of the otherwise endless, invidious, simian hall-of-mirrors of “mimetic desires.”

Girard argued that these competitive, comparative “mimetic desires” had geopolitical and not only personal and social effects, from the 18th century onward: siblings versus siblings, generations versus generations, nations versus nations (e.g., French versus Germans, 1789–1945, about which he wrote poignantly at the end of his life), cultures versus cultures (Islam versus the West today). Girard’s later work, and that of his allies and disciples, has ranged widely over these issues and themes of rivalry, imitation, envy, and scapegoating, as Cynthia Haven shows.

At Girard’s induction into the Académie Française in Paris in 2005, his fellow French Academician (and friend and Stanford colleague) Michel Serres also spoke and passionately deplored the violent and perverse world of contemporary audiovisual media, representing and exulting in human degradation “and multiplying it with a frenzy such that these repetitions return our culture to melancholic barbarism” and cause “huge” cultural “regression.” Rousseau’s idyllic Romantic dream has been transmogrified into Nietzsche’s exultant criminal vision of a world “beyond good and evil.”

Girard’s long odyssey began with an idyllic childhood and youth (1923–42) in Avignon, in the beautiful lower Rhône valley of France, Christianized in the second century, location of the Palace of the Popes, where his anti-clerical father worked as an archivist. His mother was an unusually highly educated woman for that time and a devout Catholic who read her children Manzoni’s great providential novel The Betrothed. Wartime study in Paris during the German occupation, 1942–44, and then after the Liberation, 1944–47, preceded Girard’s emigration to the United States in 1947, and his happy and enduring marriage to the American Martha McCullough in 1951. His subsequent professional trajectory took him from Indiana to Duke (where segregation left him with a lasting impression of scapegoating evil), then to Bryn Mawr and Johns Hopkins, Buffalo, Johns Hopkins again, and then to Stanford and well-merited world eminence. Despite his enormous general audience and success in France, and the amazingly successful, disintegrative, Franco-Nietzschean “deconstructionist” invasion of American and British universities, publishing houses, and elite mentalities, he “marveled at the stability of the United States and its institutions,” Girard’s biographer tells. Let us hope Girard is right.

Another Franco-American immigrant-intellectual of great integrity, intelligence, and influence, Jacques Barzun (1907–2012), wrote in his magisterial final work of cultural history, From Dawn to Decadence (2000), that modernism is “at once the mirror of disintegration and an incitement to extending it.”

Cynthia Haven’s fine book on Girard is both brilliant cultural criticism and exquisite intellectual history, and an edifying biographical and ethical tale, providing a philosophical vision of a world beyond monkey-like mimicries and manias that demoralize, dispirit, and dehumanize the contemporary human person. It deserves wide notice and careful reading in a time of massive and pervasive attention-deficit disorder.

Cynthia L. Haven’s “Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard” is the first full-length biography of the acclaimed French thinker. Girard’s “mimetic theory” saw imitation at the heart of individual desire and motivation, accounting for the competition and violence that galvanize cultures and societies. “Girard claimed that mimetic desire is not only the way we love, it’s the reason we fight. Two hands that reach towards the same object will ultimately clench into fists.”Often a controversial figure, Girard trespassed into many different fields — he was, by turns, a literary critic, an anthropologist, a sociologist, a psychologist, a theologian and much else besides. Haven’s biography is the first book to contextualize Girard’s work within its proper historical, cultural and philosophical context. The book presumes no prior knowledge, and includes several useful primers of the texts that established his reputation: “Deceit, Desire, and the Novel” (1961), “Violence and the Sacred” (1972), “Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World” (1978), and his study of Shakespeare, “A Theater of Envy” (1991). But it is the author’s closeness to the man once described as the new Darwin of the human sciences” that brings this fascinating biography to life. Haven was a friend of Girard’s until his death in 2015, and met with family members, friends and colleagues closest to him to prepare for the book. She recalls a calm and patient man who was generous with his time. “I came to his work through his kindness, generosity, and his personal friendship, not the other way around.”He lived with his wife, Martha, on the Stanford University campus, and followed a strict working routine: “Certainly his schedule would have made him at home in one of the more austere orders of monks. His working hours were systematic and adamantly maintained.” He began his day at his desk at roughly 3:30 in the morning, broke for a walk and relaxation sometime around noon, and spent his afternoons either continuing what he had begun that day or meeting his responsibilities to students.

One of the abiding questions that drives the book is how a man who appeared to lead such a quiet and ordered life was animated by some of the most troubling themes in human history.

Adopting the lively and accessible style of an investigative reporter, Haven looks to Girard’s formative experiences for an answer. The reader is along for the ride as she drives a rented Citroën through southern France, or pores over archival images and family photographs. Her research is rich in important and surprising details, and there are entertaining tidbits of juicy academic gossip along the way.

Evolution of Desire

A Life of René Girard

By Cynthia L. Haven

(Michigan State University Press; 317 pages; $29.95)

The biographer uncovers Girard’s early life as a talented but mischievous student in Avignon, his years in Nazi-occupied France (including a brush with near-death at the hands of the Gestapo), and his troubling experiences in the racially segregated American South. These careful excavations present Girard as a witness to some of the darkest chapters of the 20th century, and help to explain his interest in the figure of the scapegoat or forced sacrifice, where wider society becomes complicit in communal acts of violence.

In an academic world that favored detached skepticism, Girard’s private convictions and idiosyncratic approach contributed to his outsider image. Haven catalogs Girard’s unique intellectual engagement with a host of writers and philosophers, from Dostoevsky, Stendhal and Proust to Sartre, Camus and Derrida.

Yet there are also mystical and ambiguous influences at play. One of the highlights of the book is its treatment of Girard’s religious conversion on the Pennsylvania Railroad. These later directions in Girard’s life left their mark on his work: reading the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, Girard observed within the texts a strong identification with the victims of the scapegoating mechanism, rather than with its perpetrators. For Girard, these representations of the scapegoat as innocent victim offer the potential to break the cycle of violence.

Girard received the honor of being inducted into the Académie Française in 2005, and his influence echoes through the work of writers and thinkers that include Milan Kundera, Roberto Calasso, Karen Armstrong, Simon Schama and Elif Batuman. Haven also identifies deep affinities between Girard’s key ideas and the work of Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, whose novels “Dusklands” and “Disgrace” bear strong marks of influence.

But while Girard continues to enjoy a strong and ardent following, Haven charts how his devotion to grand narratives stood against the prevailing fads and fashions of the 1960s and beyond: “Clearly, Girard is tenaciously loyal to a heritage that has been abandoned in the last century and a half: the grand récit — that is, a meta-narrative that offers a sweeping, teleological worldview.”

“Evolution of Desire” is the portrait of a provocative and engaging figure who was not afraid of pursuing his own line of inquiry. His legacy is not so much a grand theory as it is a flexible interpretive framework with useful social, cultural and historical applications. At a time when religious fundamentalism, violent extremism and societal division dominates the headlines, Haven’s book is a call to revisit and reclaim one of the 20th century’s most important thinkers.

Rhys Tranter is the author of “Beckett’s Late Stage: Trauma, Language, and Subjectivity.” His writing has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement.

René Girard gave the intellectual universe a way of seeing old truths in a new way and new truths through an old lens. As a result, his work has already been hugely influential in a range of disciplines, both academic and cultural…

Around twenty years ago I was an oblate at Downside Abbey in England, and while there on retreat, the theologian Dom Sebastian Moore would knock on my door after Compline with a bottle of contraband whisky. It was supposed to be the great silence, but he was eager to talk theology and wanted especially to discuss a French thinker I had never heard of: René Girard.

Moore was one of the first theologians to interact with Girard’s thought, and only later did I move on with Dom Sebastian’s encouragement to read Girard’s work myself. The interface among literature, theology, and psychology was my cup of tea, and therefore it was with some anticipation that I asked for a review copy of Cynthia Haven’s new biography of Girard.

For those who are unfamiliar with René Girard and his work, a brief overview will set the stage: René Girard, who died three years ago, was a French historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science. His sprawling oeuvre might be called anthropological philosophy. His books make connections through theology, literary criticism, critical theory, anthropology, psychology, mythology, sociology, cultural studies, and philosophy.

His core theory is that our human motivations are rooted in “mimetic desire”—a form of envy which is not simply desiring what another has, but also desiring to be like them. This competitive drive then sparks all other human conflict on both the micro- and macroscopic levels. He explained how mimetic desire leads us to blame others when our desire is frustrated, which then leads to blaming others and ultimately to the mechanism of scapegoating on the societal level, which forms the basis for ritual sacrifice.

An accomplished academic, journalist, and author, Cynthia Haven was not only a colleague of Girard but also a close friend to him and his wife. Her biography is a warm, personal memoir while also providing an introduction to his thought and the historical context for the development of his ideas.

René Girard’s second name “Noël” signals his birth on Christmas Day in 1923 in Avignon, France. His father was an archivist in the local museum, and his mother from a more upper- class family proud of having a martyr-saint in their ancestry.

In 1947, with a degree in medieval history, he went on a one-year fellowship to study at Indiana University. Although his subject was history, he took a post teaching French literature. He married and settled in the United States, holding posts at Duke, Bryn Mawr, John Hopkins, and New York State at Buffalo before concluding his academic career at Stanford. Girard’s academic breakthrough was with the book Deceit, Desire and the Novel, but his most influential works are Violence and the Sacred and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World.

Ms. Haven’s biography paints a portrait of a man who, from boyhood, was introspective, intellectual, and somewhat of a mystic. Brought up in a conventional French Catholic home, by the time he was at university he had adopted the fashionable atheism of the day. Witnessing the treatment of the Jews and the scapegoating of French collaborators in the aftermath of the Second World War no doubt had an impact on the development of Girard’s thought.

The academic vigor and enthusiasm in postwar United States provided the perfect setting for a philosopher and historian who was constantly thinking outside the boundaries of strict academic territories. He would come to interact with the avant-garde writers and philosophers of his day—Camus, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida—and yet rise above them and their frequent rivalries and needy egos. In a world of narrowing academia, in which professors knew more and more about less and less, Girard was one who transcended the blinkered biases, the bureaucratic boundaries, and artificially defined territories.

As T.S. Eliot’s entire life’s work must be understood through the lens of his 1927 conversion to Christianity, so I believe Girard is also best understood through his profound reversion to his Catholic faith. In commenting on the interaction between religious awakening and the work of literature, Girard wrote, “So the career of the great novelist is dependent upon a conversion, and even if it is not made completely explicit, there are symbolic allusions to it at the end of the novel. These allusions are at least implicitly religious.”

Girard’s own awakening began in the winter of 1958-59 as he was working on his book about the novel. He recounted later, “I was thinking about the analogies between religious experience and the experience of a novelist who discovers that he’s been consistently lying, lying for the benefit of his Ego, which in fact is made up of nothing but a thousand lies that have accumulated over a long period, sometimes built up over an entire lifetime.”

His intellectual awareness was combined later with a series of profound mystical experiences as he rode on the train from Baltimore to Bryn Mawr. “I remember quasi-mystical experiences on the train as I read, contemplated the scenery… The sights were little more than scrap iron and the vacant lots in an old industrial region, but my mental state transfigured everything, and on the way back, the slightest ray from the setting sun produced veritable ecstasies within me.” A bit later he had a health scare which pushed the intellectual and the subjective mystical experiences into a firm commitment to religion.

Ms. Haven recounts, “It was Lent. He was thirty-five years old. He had never been a practicing Catholic. ‘I will never forget that day. It was Holy Wednesday, the Wednesday before Easter.’ March 25, 1959. Everything was fine, completely benign, no return of the cancer… I felt that God liberated me just in time for me to have a real Easter experience, a death and resurrection experience.’”

For those who like to spot little signs of a providential plan, it might be noted that René Girard (also called Noël) who was born on Christmas Day, dated his conversion to March 25—the feast of the Annunciation—traditionally the date for the beginning of God’s redemptive work in the world, and in medieval times the date for the celebration of the New Year.

Girard’s conversion and subsequent practice of his Catholic faith was an act of great courage. His huge leonine profile with his contemplative gaze grants him a kind of heroic stature that reflects the heroism of his witness. As post-modern academia drifted further and further into Marxist ideologies, fashionable atheism, and nihilistic post-structuralism, Girard was able to put forward an intellectual explication for age-old Christian themes using a fresh vocabulary and perspective.

Ms. Haven’s biography is beautifully and sensitively written. It carries plenty of intellectual heft without being overly weighty and inaccessible. Her enthusiasm for Girard’s thought does leave some areas untouched, however. While his work is hailed in intellectual circles as being revolutionary, for theologians it is more a case of looking at old truths from a new angle.

The critic might point out that the concept of “mimetic desire” is simply good old-fashioned envy, and that theologians have explored the complications of that original sin already in many ways. Likewise, the relationship between sacrifice and the scapegoat is as old as Leviticus. What Girard did was to provide a fresh synthesis and applications of old truths within non-religious disciplines. He also re-vivified the concept of sacrifice, explaining its underlying dynamic rather than simply writing it off as a barbaric superstition.

In an age where atheism is all the rage and all religions (especially Catholicism) are suspect, Girard does a great service in refreshing the language of the tribe and giving the intellectual universe a way of seeing old truths in a new way and new truths through an old lens. As a result, his work has already been hugely influential in a range of disciplines, both academic and cultural.

A reviewer must grumble a little, and my only niggle was the somewhat humid atmosphere of the hoity-toity and the haute academe. Of course, Girard was a thinker—and a French one at that, but at times the lofty airs and intense and dense overthinking become a bit wearing.

Ms. Haven is not much of a name-dropper, but when she describes, for example, The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man symposium held at John Hopkins in 1966, the pomposity of the whole affair is comedic. I sensed a touch of sarcasm as she reports the competing egos of famous French philosophers and the rivalry between intellectuals trying to see whose presentations can be the most incomprehensible, while they are also comparing notes on the luxury of their accommodations and the numbers of young women they are able to lure into philosophical discussions between the sheets.

For those who chuckle at the snooty name-dropping of what Flannery O’Conner called “them innerleckshuls,” here is a passage in which Ms. Haven quotes one of Girard’s colleagues, the Scotsman Lionel Gossman on a visit to John Hopkins:

I remember in particular Sir Nicholas Pevsner’s delight when I showed him the elegant industrial design of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad’s round house and the silence that came over the poet Yves Bonnefoy as we stood before the modest grave of Edgar Allen Poe on which the famous verses of Mallarmé are inscribed.

To be fair, these famous names and “high-falutin’” footnotes provide a nice counterpoint to Girard’s seriousness and modesty. The rest of them may have been egotistical, competitive, and status-hungry, but Ms. Haven portrays Girard as a man whose gravity and intimidating demeanor was undergirded by a genuine modesty that was always ready with a warm welcome, a listening ear, and an engaged and interested mind. While those around him may have been climbing the academic ladder, seeking fame and fortune, Girard comes across as a sincere seeker and a master of wisdom.

Critics will say that his theory is incomplete, that he has not connected all the dots and that there are inconsistencies between his theory and orthodox Catholic theology. Ms. Haven points out that Girard never suggested that his work was “an answer to everything,” but that he was only planting seeds so that others might continue the work and bring more understandings of Truth to the harvest.

As a graduate student I remember asking one of my most respected mentors, Michael Buckley, about a rift between two larger-than-life professors at the University of Chicago: Leo Strauss and Richard McKeon —“Was the root of the dispute intellectual or personal?” My mentor responded, “In these matt ers it’s always personal.” Perhaps due to its sweeping nature, the statement stuck with me. Buckley was no Girardian, but neither was Shakespeare or Proust. Yet Girard’s mimetic theory— majestic in its simplicity, sweeping in its scope — has a way of gathering up stray anecdotes and incidents into its collective force, like a hurricane that swallows up every bit of moisture within range.

Cynthia Haven’s Evolution of Desire offers the first of two long-awaited bibliographies of Girard (the other, which has the official sanction of the Girard family, is by Benoît Chantre). Rather than providing a biographer’s biography— full of footnotes, every stone overturned, weighty enough to ensure nobody else tries to write one — Haven has instead provided a portrait of sorts, bringing to life the Girard she came to know in the winter of his life. This is not to say that Evolution of Desire reads as a kind of “ last days and sayings ” of René Girard; Chantre has already provided that in Les derniers jours de René Girard (Grasset, 2016). Haven prefers the early Girard, providing remarkable insights into his childhood, and underscoring the importance of his birthplace, Avignon, for his intellectual development. Of his intellectual collaborators, Haven favors those from Girard’s first stint at Hopkins, rather than later figures. By doing so, she downplays the interactions between theological interlocutors like Raymund Schwager and James Alison, perhaps the most important current translator of mimetic theory into Christian theology. Schwager receives some attention, but Alison’s name does not grace the book.

Even those familiar with the brazen and iconoclastic interdisciplinary style of Girard can forget what an autodidact he was. Girard’s training, both in France and in the United States, was in history. The École des Chartes formed students into librarians and archivists. From there Girard went to
the United States, where his forgettable dissertation at the University of Indiana covered American opinions on France during the Second World War. When Girard came to literature in the 1950s and 60s, he did so as an outsider. And he continued this pattern of butting into adjacent fields, among them anthropology, ethnology, and eventually theology. Haven ’s recounting of Girard’s early years highlights the panache that would mark Girard. Whether as a prankster in school, or as the organizer of an exhibit that brought Picasso to Avignon in 1947 — this event initiated the world-renowned Avignon Festival — Girard displayed winning qualities before becoming an immortel in the Académie Française.

For those who’ve tracked Girard for the past three decades, it is easy t o start with Girard’s occupancy of the Hammond Chair at Stanford, beginning in 1981. Haven points out the importance of the earlier academic posts, especially his first stint at Johns Hopkins from 1957 – 68. There Girard made his reputation and also experienced a two-fold conversion, first with the help of great literature, and then through a cancer scare in 1959. During this period Girard published Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961) and rose to full professor, hardly an anticipated development given his failure to publish at Indiana. Girard enthusiasts know these details, mostly from his interview with James Williams at the end of The Girard Reader. Haven embellishes them through corroborating witnesses from these years. In perhaps the most enjoyable chapter, “The French Invasion,” she recalls Girard’s role in a monumental conference at Hopkins: “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man.” This event marked the American emergence of Derrida, and decisively shifted Johns Hopkins as well as many other departments toward post-structuralism, or postmodernism. Although Girard had helped organize the conference, it led indirectly to his departure for Buffalo, as he could not bring himself to accept what he understood to be the anti-realist impulse of postmodern theory, which would become all the rage in literature departments
In his first stint at Hopkins, Girard became Girard. He trained his first graduate students there, including Andrew McKenna and Eric Gans. Girard also found important companions in Baltimore, including Richard Macksey, described as “a legendary polymath” (84), and a rising Dante scholar, John Freccero. Girard’s former chair at Hopkins, Nathan Edelman, recalls, “I thought of him as fearless. He had a tremendous self- confidence, in the best sense […] He never felt threatened by people who had different ideas […] We were enthralled by him. We desperately wanted his approval” (85). These sentiments arose well before Girard before he became a pied piper to Christian intellectuals. The strongest personal accusation from these years was that Girard could overgeneralize and dismiss too easily.

Most would consider a move from Hopkins to the State University of Buffalo, especially for a man from southern France, as a kind of exile. But Girard loved Buffalo, and it is where he wrote Violence and the Sacred and also where he laid the groundwork for Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World . One colleague called Buffalo “the most interesting English department in the country” (149). During these years Girard also met Jean-Michel Oughourlian, the first of many collaborators who would help Girard develop his distinctive interview-book. After an initial false start, in which Oughourlian flew to New York on a whim and had no idea how to find Buffalo, the two eventually met in Paris. Oughourlian became perhaps Girard’s closest friend, and their collaboration continued when Girard returned to Hopkins in 1976. Oughourlian describes an idyllic exchange; not only did they work every day, from morning to evening, but, in his words, “I have never laughed so much during the preparation of Things Hidden , nor have I ever learned so much” (177). In this work Girard completed what he considered the unfinished account in Violence and the Sacred by bringing Biblical interpretation into conversation with his theory of archaic religion and sacrifice. Published eight years after the former book, Things Hidden signaled Girard’s coming out as a Christian, nearly twenty years after re-conversion in 1959.

North Americans have developed a domesticated portrait of Girard: an interesting and important intellectual in the thrall of certain theologians. Yet in France, where the intellectual appetite is greater, Girard made an impact difficult to fathom. Haven notes that Things Hidden sold 35,000 copies in the first six months, which put it #2 on French non-fiction lists at the time. Eventually it sold 100,000 copies. That type of volume puts its somewhere between Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind in terms of immediate impact, and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age or Alistair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, in terms of longevity. In France, if you had not read Things Hidden, you at least needed to fake it. Girard credited his publisher for the success, but Haven brings out Girard’s penchant for melding social critique with self-examination, which often produced the experience of realizing, while reading his books, that they were reading you.

Haven describes Girard’s conversion and attends to his practice of Christianity, but does not make it the central thread of her biography. Although she relies on exchanges with friends of Girard, she pays less mind than some would to the encounter with Schwager, the Swiss Jesuit, despite the fact that their letters have recently been published and translated into English. Schwager first wrote Girard in 1974, and at that time saw what had only been a plan in Girard’s mind: the connection between the Bible and Girard’s theory of the sacred. When Schwager wrote Must There Be Scapegoats? , it actually appeared a few months prior to Things Hidden. As their letters make clear, despite a great debt to Girard, Schwager was an original thinker in his own right, and eventually helped Girard to change his mind about the relationship between sacrifice and Christianity. Haven credits Schwager with encouraging Girard’s desire to be theologically orthodox, although this had mixed results. By becoming a sort of defender of the Catholic faith, it “took him one large step farther away from fashionable intellectual circles and their feverish pursuit of novelty” (228). Haven also passes over The Scapegoat (1982), and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (2001), which provide perhaps the richest sources for understanding Girard as a Christian thinker.

This decision is somewhat remedied by Haven’s attention to Girard’s final major work, Battling to the End (2007). Haven was close to Girard at the time, and provides several first-hand anecdotes important for his readers. The pessimism and apocalyptic tone in the book really was Girard’s, and not Chantre’s. She also relays that Girard and Chantre had plans for an additional book on Paul. Although Battling to the End made a minor splash in the United States, it sold 20,000 copies in the first three months in France, was reviewed in all of the major newspapers, and was even cited by then-president Sarkosy. While Girard was in Paris, reporters waited outside his doorstep, whereas at St anford, “Girard walked the campus virtually unnoticed and unrecognized” (254).

Haven’s account focuses more on Girard than on the expansions of his influence. For many Girardians, the story of Girard’s intellectual journey should culminate in the Colloquium on Violence & Religion, founded in 1990 with Girard’s blessing, and faithfully attended by Girard until ill-health prevented him. The Colloquium continues to draw between one and two hundred attendees to its annual meeting. Although not all attendees are theologians or Christians, the attendees who work in literature tend to study figures like Tolkien, and many of the invited plenary speakers are major theologians or Christian intellectuals like Jean-Luc Marion or Charles Taylor. It will take some recalibration for these kinds of readers to understand that Girard’s interests cannot simply be distilled into a Christian apologetic, however subtly one might want to apply that term to Girard. Still, those invested in carrying on Girard’s lega cy should welcome a book that traces Girard’s appeal so broadly.

It would be hard to exaggerate the accessibility of Evolution of Desire. Anyone who writes or talks about Girard has to do the three-step dance: first, explaining how mimetic desire works for good and for ill; second, positing the invention of the scapegoat mechanism as the foundation for society; third, the emergence of biblical religion as the unveiling of the mythic cover up. Haven does this dance with remarkable deftness. In addition, her brief accounts of post-structuralism and other intellectual movements display almost Platonic distillation. It is also a personal book.

Haven talks about herself, at times frankly, and it sometimes reads as “ Girard As I Knew Him. ” These features do not detract in any way. As Haven portrays him, Girard was a man of decency and humility, who loved his wife and displayed almost none of the unattractive qualities that mark so many academics.

Anybody interested in Girard will want to read this work. The book is so readable , meant in the most complimentary sense, that one might even hope that it renews interest in Girard. The man claimed on more than one occasion that his theory sought to give Christianity and Christian theologians the anthropology that it deserved. Haven has provided a warm and magnanimous biography that Girard most certainly deserves.

René Girard, one of the most influential Catholic philosophers in the world, died last week at the age of 91. Born in Avignon and a member of the illustrious Academie Francaise, Girard nevertheless made his academic reputation in the United States, as a professor at Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University, and Stanford University.

There are some thinkers that offer intriguing ideas and proposals, and there is a tiny handful of thinkers that manage to shake your world. Girard was in this second camp. In a series of books and articles, written across several decades, he proposed a social theory of extraordinary explanatory power. Drawing inspiration from some of the greatest literary masters of the West—Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Proust among others—Girard opined that desire is both mimetic and triangular. He meant that we rarely desire objects straightforwardly; rather, we desire them because others desire them: as we imitate (mimesis) another’s desire, we establish a triangulation between self, other, and object. If this sounds too rarefied, think of the manner in which practically all of advertising works: I come to want those gym shoes, not because of their intrinsic value, but because the hottest NBA star wants them. Now what mimetic desire leads to, almost inevitably, is conflict. If you want to see this dynamic in the concrete, watch what happens when toddler A imitates the desire of toddler B for the same toy, or when dictator A mimics the desire of dictator B for the same route of access to the sea.

The tension that arises from mimetic desire is dealt with through what Girard called the scapegoating mechanism. A society, large or small, that finds itself in conflict comes together through a common act of blaming an individual or group purportedly responsible for the conflict. So for instance, a group of people in a coffee klatch will speak in an anodyne way for a time, but in relatively short order, they will commence to gossip, and they will find, customarily, a real fellow feeling in the process. What they are accomplishing, on Girard’s reading, is a discharging of the tension of their mimetic rivalry onto a third party. The same dynamic obtains among intellectuals. When I was doing my post-graduate study, I heard the decidedly Girardian remark: “the only thing that two academics can agree upon is how poor the work of a third academic is!” Hitler was one of the shrewdest manipulators of the scapegoating mechanism. He brought the deeply divided German nation of the 1930’s together precisely by assigning the Jews as a scapegoat for the country’s economic, political, and cultural woes. Watch a video of one of the Nuremberg rallies of the mid-thirties to see the Girardian theory on vivid display.

Now precisely because this mechanism produces a kind of peace, however ersatz and unstable, it has been revered by the great mythologies and religions of the world and interpreted as something that God or the gods smile upon. Perhaps the most ingenious aspect of Girard’s theorizing is his identification of this tendency. In the founding myths of most societies, we find some act of primal violence that actually establishes the order of the community, and in the rituals of those societies, we discover a repeated acting out of the original scapegoating. For a literary presentation of this ritualization of society-creating violence, look no further than Shirley Jackson’s masterpiece “The Lottery.”

The main features of this theory were in place when Girard turned for the first time in a serious way to the Christian Scriptures. What he found astonished him and changed his life. He discovered that the Bible knew all about mimetic desire and scapegoating violence but it also contained something altogether new, namely, the de-sacralizing of the process that is revered in all of the myths and religions of the world. The crucifixion of Jesus is a classic instance of the old pattern. It is utterly consistent with the Girardian theory that Caiaphas, the leading religious figure of the time, could say to his colleagues, “Is it not better for you that one man should die for the people than for the whole nation to perish?” In any other religious context, this sort of rationalization would be valorized. But in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, this stunning truth is revealed: God is not on the side of the scapegoaters but rather on the side of the scapegoated victim. The true God in fact does not sanction a community created through violence; rather, he sanctions what Jesus called the Kingdom of God, a society grounded in forgiveness, love, and identification with the victim. Once Girard saw this pattern, he found it everywhere in the Gospels and in Christian literature. For a particularly clear example of the unveiling process, take a hard look at the story of the woman caught in adultery.

In the second half of the twentieth century, academics tended to characterize Christianity—if they took it seriously at all—as one more iteration of the mythic story that can be found in practically every culture. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to Star Wars, the “mono-myth,” to use Joseph Campbell’s formula, is told over and again. What Girard saw was that this tired theorizing has it precisely wrong. In point of fact, Christianity is the revelation (the unveiling) of what the myths want to veil; it is the deconstruction of the mono-myth, not a reiteration of it—which is exactly why so many within academe want to domesticate and de-fang it.

The recovery of Christianity as revelation, as an unmasking of what all the other religions are saying, is René Girard’s permanent and unsettling contribution.

A white gunman opened fire on the Tree of Life Congregation Synagogue in Pittsburgh on Saturday morning

The synagogue was packed for a Sabbath service and had no security

Earlier this week a man was arrested in Florida for mailing 14 pipe bombs to high-profile liberals including President Clinton and Obama

In another incident a man in Louisville attempted to break into a black church but upon finding it was locked he shot dead two people at a supermarket

James Gordon

The Daily Mail

27 October 2018

The past week has been one of extraordinary violence in the United States.

It has been one in which an alleged white supremacist sent 14 pipe bombs to prominent democratic supporters including two former Presidents; a man who killed two people at a Kroger grocery store in Kentucky tried to enter a black church minutes before the fatal shooting; and on Saturday, a gunman appears to have killed at least eight people at a Pittsburgh synagogue.

Some commentators have suggested such news had ‘an air of inevitability’- the result of the culmination of what has is a violent time in political culture.

With a nation divided, violence seems to permeates political dialogue and sometimes erupts at political events.

The synagogue in a leafy suburb of Pittsburgh was packed for a Sabbath service and had no security

President Trump repeatedly invites his supporters to beat up protesters at his rallies, and then implies that the protesters bring such violence on themselves by disrupting him.

New York philanthropist and major Democratic donor George Soros, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and CNN all received letter bombs in the mail.

New York mayor Bill De Blasio called the pipe bombs an ‘act of terror’.

With FBI investigations just starting, it’s impossible to say whether the perpetrator or perpetrators were rightwing nationalists, but their intended victims suggest the possibility of such markings.

On Wednesday two African-Americans were shot dead in the parking lot of a grocery store in the Louisville suburb of Jeffersontown.

The suspect, believed to be Gregory A. Bush, 51, had tried to enter the First Baptist Church in just 15 minutes earlier but could not get inside.

When Bush was unable to enter the church, he went to the store and opened fire, killing two.

One of 14 pipe bombs that were sent in the mail this week to prominent democrats and vocal opponents of Donald Trump. This one was addressed to former CIA head John Brennan at CNN

It may come as no more of a surprisethat Jewish people were the target of Saturday’s shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in the leafy, middle-class neighborhood of Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh.

The areas is where most of the city’s Jewish residents live making up 40% of the demographics and the shooter will have known that Saturday morning Sabbath services would have commanded a larger presence than during the week.

At the time of the shooting, three different congregations were holding services at the Tree of Life facility.

Situated five miles away from downtown Pittsburgh the community would have felt safe and secure in their enclave with the possibility of a shooting or acts of violence far from anyone’s mind.

Although the community are often on ‘alert’ during Jewish holidays such as Yom Kippur or Rosh Hashanah, many synagogues across the U.S. reduce their levels of security throughout the rest of the year.

Gregory Bush, left, was arraigned on two counts of murder after fatally shooting two African-American customers at a grocery store Wednesday, meanwhile Cesar Sayoc, right, was arrested on allegations that he was the person that mailed pipe bomb devices to Trump critics

Yet violence has now spread to leafy, tree-lined suburbia.

Squirrel Hill North is home to the charming, leafy campuses of Carnegie Mellon University and Chatham University.

There are also an eclectic mix of Thai and Indian eateries, pizza joints and delis along Forbes Avenue which runs through the neighborhood.

The synagogue was founded more than 150 years ago when two Pittsburgh congregations merged to form the Tree of Life.

The congregation describes itself as a conservative Jewish congregation which remains true to traditional teachings, yet is also ‘progressive and relevant to the way modern day life.’

‘From our warm, inviting and intellectually stimulating atmosphere to our fun adult, children and family programs, it’s the perfect environment to grow a strong faith rooted in tradition,’ the synagogue promote on their website.

The process of globalization and cultural exchange is sometimes clearer in the most outlandish examples.

W. David Marx

Vox

Oct 19, 2018

In January 2018, a surprising clothing item popped up on the South Korean fashion scene: boxy oversize T-shirts with the logo of Jesse Jackson’s 1988 US presidential campaign. As the weather got warmer, the shirt became a staple for trendy women across the country. Some of the shirts read “JESSE JACKSON ’88 — FOR PRESIDENT,” while others said “JESSE JACKSON ’88 — BLESS YOU.” There was even a misspelled “JESS JACKSON ’88” line of tank tops for men.

The shirt was popular with celebrities and college students alike: Rapper Moonbyul, for example, wore the shirt in the music video for her May release, “In My Room.” After the Jackson shirts’ initial appearance in South Korea, they quickly spread to stylish women across Asia, sold in cheap shopping markets and on e-tailers from provincial China to Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand.

Is the popularity of this shirt a sign of a broader Korean interest in Jesse Jackson’s historic run for the Democratic nomination for president in 1988? No, says Seoul-based social media influencer and beauty blogger Han Yoo Ra: “I think it’s just about the design. People may be aware of the English but they don’t know the deeper meaning or that it’s meant to be political. The word ‘Jesse’ is just cute. It’s nothing more serious than that.”

To her point, retailers of the shirts don’t explain the context of Jackson’s campaign to prospective buyers. The Korean fashion site Yuiiyuii, for example, recommends the shirt for its “smart color scheme” and “sensuous lettering” in “harmonized colors” that can be “mixed and matched like a stylish model.” The retailer NSmall models the shirt along with alternatives such as one with the Chupa Chups lollipop logo.

In other words, the Jesse Jackson T-shirt is sold asfashion — not as a political statement. And nothing makes this point clearer than when the real-life Jesse Jackson visited South Korea in July of this year and there wasn’t any major dialogue in Korean media about how local youth were embracing his 1988 campaign.

The absurdity of a Jesse Jackson campaign T-shirt becoming a trendy item among people who don’t know Jesse Jackson, however, is useful as a way to examine how fashions arise among youth in Asia. With many pan-Asian trends in fashion, beauty, and music, South Korea sets the rhythm for the rest of the continent. Han and other Korean sources couldn’t locate the exact origin of the Jesse Jackson T-shirt, but its popularity follows a common pattern.

Han explains: “Korean trends mostly start in the country’s underground markets, where everything is on sale for about $10 and the quality isn’t so bad. Even foreign fast-fashion brands like Zara can be too expensive for Koreans, so teenage girls and 20-somethings tends to buy these cheaper underground brands.”

Hit items first go on sale in Seoul’s gargantuan Dongdaemun Market, where the products come from fly-by-night brands that pump out massive numbers of garments. The few that have names are called things like Ossazi, D2GARMENTORY, and Retno. Internet-savvy young women purchase items from the markets for resale on their Instagram accounts, modeling the pieces in the styling trends of the moment.

Once these images hit the internet, two things happen. First, local garment-makers can check to see what’s selling and then create their own slightly tweaked versions. If a Jesse Jackson T-shirt is selling well, another brand can, say, remove the “e” from Jesse to offer an ostensibly “different” product on the same theme.

Second, online images allow the items to quickly go global. Chinese manufacturers scout Korean websites and social media accounts for hit trends and make their own versions. The Chinese and Korean manufacturers then distribute the shirts to malls and e-commerce sites across the continent.

And when Korean-manufactured items are sold outside of Korea, they are often sold as Korean trends. On Singapore’s Carousell, for example, the seller offers the Jesse Jackson shirt as a representative garment of the Korean Ulzzang look — a buzzword denoting the personal style of sharp-featured, pale-skinned Korean internet influencers. In accordance to the advice seen on sites like Fasheholic, the No. 1 way to be “Ulzzang” is to wear an oversize print T-shirt with English lettering.

This is a fundamentally different model from two decades ago, when Japan was the most important fashion market in Asia. Vintage T-shirts in Japan took on cachet from the importation process: These were “real things” from the United States, once worn by real Americans.

In the past, American political items found their way into Asian teen fashion mostly through Japan’s thousands of secondhand shops. These stores bulk-import vintage T-shirts from thrift stores and rag houses across the United States, and Japanese youth looking for unique items with English lettering can end up brandishing American political garments and accessories — such as Brock Adams and other obscure politicians’ campaign buttons and, in more jarring examples, “Rush is Right” baseball caps and pro-secessionist Confederate flag shirts.

The Jesse Jackson shirts in South Korea, however, are not an accident of bulk importation. They are all brand new garments, manufactured by a handful of local companies to be sold in Korea and the rest of Asia.

The current cachet for crisp, ersatz garments like Jesse Jackson T-shirts comes not from Americans but from the items’ association with trendy Korean women. With the popularity of Korean dramas, K-pop music, and Korean beauty brands across Asia, South Korea has taken the lead in soft power for the continent. And with Korean fashion being based around affordable casual clothing (that can be easily knocked off), less affluent Southeast Asians can easily import garments or buy a local version.

The question remains, however: Why specifically did a Jesse Jackson ’88 campaign T-shirt, of all things, get sucked into the Korea-driven Asian trend system? A few sources close to the Korean pop culture suggest that the number “88” may be the driver. 1988 is the birth year of the “King of K-pop,” G-Dragon of the group Big Bang, who often wears a 1988 Seoul Olympics hat. And one of the more popular Korean dramas of the past few years has been Reply 1988, a nostalgic romance set in the newly democratic South Korea of that year. Chinese consumers, on the other hand, may be drawn “88” because it’s considered the luckiest number.

But this kind of speculation misses the point: The Jesse Jackson ’88 “content” is the least important aspect of the shirt. In today’s globalized world, items can jump between cultures, but they mostly succeed in other places because they take on completely new meanings upon arrival.

The United States has long enjoyed an influence on the world’s pop culture and style, and Americans hardly bat an eye to see major American brands like Nike, Supreme, or Polo Ralph Lauren sold across the world. But they are often only popular because local trendsetters breath new life and meaning into the specific items. Consumers buy them because they’re legitimized by local influencers, not by country of origin. But when we don’t see that process, we Americans read the trends as more proof of our nation’s “soft power.”

This truth of globalization is easier to see in these absurd examples, when something incongruous takes off, such as an old campaign T-shirt from a failed primary run. In this particular example, the “Jesse Jackson ’88” part of the T-shirt may have its origin in the annals of American history, but the shirt caught on because of its exalted position within the Korean casual fashion system.

Jesse Jackson, or even America, has little to do with why Jesse Jackson ’88 campaign T-shirts are popular. Instead, it’s South Korea’s incredible cultural power that makes things cool in Asia — even American political nostalgia.

Once seen as honest workwear, the brand also has rebel spirit. No wonder the T-shirt has been ubiquitous in 2018

Malcolm Mackenzie

The Guardian

9 Sep 2018

When historians look back on the summer of 2018, they will talk about the record-breaking heatwave, the World Cup – and Levi’s T-shirts. On the train, in the park, at the art gallery; they are everywhere.

Levi’s says that revenues from online sales grew 19% in the second quarter of 2018. But why? Could it be that in these frighteningly uncertain times, a classic brand such as Levi’s feels reassuring? Historically, Levi’s was workwear. It stands for old-school tradition, but it also has ties with rebellion and counterculture; like Oreos and Oprah, it brings together both sides of the American political spectrum. It is cool without being pretentious, and widely available: John Lewis, Debenhams, Topman, Asos and Amazon all stock the classic Levi’s tee, as well as Levi’s shops themselves. It might also be that it serves as a substitute for the pricier/trendier Supreme box logo shirt, but at a pocket-patting £20.

Advertising has probably played a part in its recent popularity, even if it feels as if this trend started on the street. In August last year, the company released Circles, an ad showing people from different cultures dancing, from Bhangra to hora, dabke to dancehall, with the tagline: “Men, women, young, old, rich, poor, straight, gay: let’s live how we dance.” With 22m views, it was one of the top 10 most-watched ads on YouTube in 2017.

We asked Levi-wearing members of the public about their choice of purchase:

Ryan, 21 “I got mine a couple of months ago. I’d seen them before in a couple of places and I like the design and the brand because it’s classic.”

Meghan, 26 “I was given mine as a birthday present. Levi’s means good quality, I like that a white T-shirt is simple, goes with everything.”

Rafay, 32 “I bought the tee last year because I felt like the 90s/00s logo resurgence was a cute moment, but now I have started seeing them everywhere and it’s a bit much. It might have to become an ‘around the house’ tee instead.”

Chris, 39 “I bought it two weeks ago. I just liked the colour. Levi’s is the original: the first jeans brand, and it’s cool.”

Wesam, 22 “I was given the shirt as a gift three months ago. We saw this in the shop and liked it. It’s a classic.”

Valerie, 27 “Snoopy was the deciding factor for me. I’ve seen lots of people wearing the Levi’s T-shirts since I bought it, but I haven’t seen mine, so it doesn’t really bother me.”